Ms. Osier — Kelvin Hong
Teacher: Ms. Osier
Subject Area: Business Management (BOH4M), International Business (BBB4M)
Technology Used: Webs, KeepVid, Google Calendar, Google Drive
Description of Project
The goal of this placement was to create a dedicated website for Ms. Osier’s senior business courses. The completed website can be found here.
The website was to have two main pages, one for Business Management and the other for International Business. The content of these two pages were to be spread out over several subpages, including one page for assignments and other course documents as well as another page for video resources. Ms. Osier and I decided that making these subpages would increase organization and overall accessibility/navigation of the site. In addition to course material, the website was to contain additional student resources, including an announcement widget, course calendar and links to other websites.
The final site was made and published using the Webs website-building platform. I chose Webs to create Ms. Osier’s website because it is very user-friendly (all editor functions are WYSIWYG, meaning no programming experience is necessary) and quite full-featured for a free service. Compared to other platforms, such as Weebly and Wix, ads are minimal and web storage is abundant. Furthermore, I believe that the user interface is more intuitive and easy-to-use than other platforms, which will make it easier for Ms. Osier to update the website in the future.
Subject Area: Business Management (BOH4M), International Business (BBB4M)
Technology Used: Webs, KeepVid, Google Calendar, Google Drive
Description of Project
The goal of this placement was to create a dedicated website for Ms. Osier’s senior business courses. The completed website can be found here.
The website was to have two main pages, one for Business Management and the other for International Business. The content of these two pages were to be spread out over several subpages, including one page for assignments and other course documents as well as another page for video resources. Ms. Osier and I decided that making these subpages would increase organization and overall accessibility/navigation of the site. In addition to course material, the website was to contain additional student resources, including an announcement widget, course calendar and links to other websites.
The final site was made and published using the Webs website-building platform. I chose Webs to create Ms. Osier’s website because it is very user-friendly (all editor functions are WYSIWYG, meaning no programming experience is necessary) and quite full-featured for a free service. Compared to other platforms, such as Weebly and Wix, ads are minimal and web storage is abundant. Furthermore, I believe that the user interface is more intuitive and easy-to-use than other platforms, which will make it easier for Ms. Osier to update the website in the future.
The course calendar embedded on the website is a Google calendar, synced with Ms. Osier’s teaching Gmail account. Not only is the Google calendar easy to update and manage (as events for both courses can be modified and included in one calendar), students can directly sync the calendar with their personal devices to stay up to date with important events.
Ms. Osier frequently uses YouTube videos to supplement her lessons and had a number of links ready before the start of this placement. To make sure that the videos are always available, I downloaded high-resolution copies of each one using the free KeepVid service and then uploaded the files to Ms. Osier’s Google Drive. Finally, I embedded the videos onto the corresponding video resources page for each course.
Possible Uses in Other Classes/Subject Areas
Webs is ideal for creating visually-impressive and functional course websites. A number of templates are available in the free package, meaning teachers in all subject areas can customize their websites accordingly. Calendar, members-only area (require students to sign up to access site) and forum functions are included as well. Web storage is abundant (400 MB+) and ads are minimal. Lastly, the user interface is very straightforward and requires no programming experience to use.
Google Calendar is wonderful for managing course calendars. Teachers can create calendars for any number of classes and include them in one calendar widget (i.e. on a website or blog). What’s great is that new events can be created/old ones deleted or modified directly from the teacher’s Google account and all embedded calendar widgets will automatically update based on those changes. A number of other features are available, including syncing with mobile devices (see Description of Project), advanced sharing settings and automatic reminders.
KeepVid downloads streaming videos from YouTube. It’s fast, free and easy-to-use. Teachers can use it to download and save local copies of YouTube videos relevant to course content.
Google Drive is the superlative file storage service. Free accounts get 15 GB of storage, which can be used to host countless course PowerPoints, PDFs, videos downloaded using KeepVid, and any other files. Not only this, but Google Drive is fully linked with Google’s productivity suite, Google Docs, which makes it even easier to view and edit documents.
Portfolio Piece
A virtual tour of Ms. Osier's website, made using Prezi